


three drops of blood

by betony



Category: Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 10:45:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betony/pseuds/betony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>slash of blood against snow and who would wish for a child</i><br/><i>"red as blood"—pretty words,</i><br/><i>but the daughter suffers.</i><br/>--Lightsey Darst, "[Snow White]"</p>
<p>The Queen has her tale. The Court has another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	three drops of blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [storm_queen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_queen/gifts).



> storm_queen, I hope you have a wonderful Yuletide, and that this is to your tastes and liking!  
> 

In the end, they bound the child to existence with love.  


Her Majesty had argued against it, with a ferocity that belied her frail, golden frame, shouted that there were plenty of other reasons for a child to be brought into the world. Duty, for one, and protection; and beyond those there was always sheer bad luck. But the hedgewitch had been adamant. If they were to disrupt the forces of nature enough to create a child in Her Majesty’s barren womb, it would have to be love that held the strength to do it, or else nothing.  


Her Majesty had clearly not been pleased, and more than once wondered aloud if she should seek help elsewhere. An enchantress could have done it, or a sorcerer, perhaps, without needing to go to the lengths that the hedgewitch, with her philtres of love potions and safety charms, did. But Her Majesty had come to the hedgewitch specifically because she lacked the notoriety that consulting a greater magician would bring, and because the scorn and derision generally heaped on hedgewitches meant the girl would have no choice but to do as Her Majesty demanded and to keep her silence.  


She agreed.  


Her Majesty spent all of a summer with the hedgewitch, under the excuse that she was visiting her parents instead. Days the hedgewitch spent locked into her sweltering cottage, boiling spiderwebs and June roses together with lover’s knots before she added bluebells and beetle carapaces. Nights the two young women spent in stony silence before the loneliness broke down their barriers, and they became--to their own surprise--friends. 

They shared recipes and laughter and secrets over the summer. The hedgewitch described how she had apprenticed herself to a lowly witch because there was little else a farmer's daughter could do when she wasn't particularly pretty or talented at anything else. Her Majesty spoke longingly of her idyllic childhood on her father's manor. The hedgewitch confessed that what she feared most was fading into obscurity, tucked away in the countryside where no one would know she had even lived. And on a humid muggy afternoon, Her Majesty admitted that not a day went by that, to her shame, she did not suspect she could manage the kingdom better than her husband. Her eyes shone, then, when she spoke of what she would want to do.  


“Please,” urged the hedgewitch in return. “Use that. Give me that, to seal the potion. There's nothing stronger than love to seal a great magic; nothing deadlier, for that matter.”  


The next morning, Her Majesty stood in the damp, humid cottage and breathed her dreams for the kingdom, and her love for its people: the smiling children coming home from new schools, the soldiers sent home from the borders to rejoin their house, the hedgewitches (and here Her Majesty paused to smile at her friend) allowed to practice their art with the same respect that other magic-workers commanded.  


She added this, too: “I want my daughter to be beautiful. I want her to have skin white as snow, hair dark as night, lips red as blood.“ And the hedgewitch, who had pale skin, and clumps of dark hair, and lips that she bit too often, smiled ruefully.  


“It’ll cause problems, you know,” she told Her Majesty.  


Her Majesty merely said, recklessly, “I don’t care. I want her to have something of you, to remember where she came from. You’ll live with us in the palace, as her godmother, you know, once I send for you.”  


She had not brought this proposition up at any point before then, but the hedgewitch was too charmed and too grateful to bring up any further reminders of common sense and only stirred the potion three more times to lock the magic into place.  


It turned a brilliant scarlet.  


“I am the greatest Witch in the world,” breathed the hedgewitch, dazzled by her own power as she drew up a vial of the gleaming contents. This she gave to Her Majesty, with deliberate instructions on how to take to ensure a child would be born to her; and if the rest of the hedgewitch’s cauldron disappeared into her cupboards for some other sinister use, well, who could blame her?  


Before she left, Her Majesty embraced her friend, and presented her with a gift—a silver mirror—as a sign of her worth. Again she repeated her promise of bringing the hedgewitch to serve her in the palace—“We’ll make the kingdom rise again together”—and then, at last, she slipped away upon the backroads.  


Against her better judgment, the hedgewitch waited until the next spring for the news of the young Princess’s birth. She occupied her time by making plans of the tiny useful spells she would prepare for her goddaughter, and the far more important ways in which she would become her Queen’s right hand as Her Majesty prepared to undo the problems her husband had caused. She spent so much time doing so, in fact, that the news that came from the palace—that Her Majesty had tragically passed away in childbed after having delivered an infant Princess—took her entirely by surprise.  


The hedgewitch knew every last drop of potion she had given Her Majesty to take. There was no way, under heaven or upon earth, that Her Majesty’s pregnancy would have resulted in death.  


Unless—unless.  


It made quite a bit of sense, the hedgewitch realized, that Her Majesty, fruitless for so long, would have suffered in childbirth; enough in fact that it could have masked the order of an angry husband who had wanted a son, or a jealous one who had wanted his child to resemble him, to have his wife killed.  


The hedgewitch thought on it for some time more, until the grief had boiled away, leaving only a dull, heavy anger at everyone concerned. Then she sold her cottage and went away, taking only a small flash of bright red liquid with her, and a silver mirror. No one who had known her before ever saw her again.

* * *

After the King's second wedding, it soon became apparent that the new Queen was the only one who cared two pins for what was to become of the motherless young Princess.  


The discovery was made accidentally, of course, in that the young nurse minding the princess was under ordinary circumstances perfectly aware that the Queen was only the Princess’s stepmother, not mother, and so not to be disturbed with tales of the nursery. But these sort of considerations entirely fled her mind when the Princess woke warm and feverish in her cradle one morning, and the poor girl realized she had no idea what to do.  


She knew better at least than to consult the King; his only participation in the life of his daughter was to give her the outlandish name of Snow White, his interest dimmed first by his grief at his wife’s death, and second by his love for the new Queen—some sort of forest beauty who’d offered him food from her own table and water from her own well as he wandered, lost and weary, away from the rest of his hunt.  


He had fallen in love over the course of the afternoon; had brought her back to his castle by evening; and had married her by moonrise, and in less than a month it seemed the new Queen with her serene countenance had always sat at his side.  


But that was no excuse for the nurse’s mistake--for mistake it was, from the moment the Queen saw the baby’s flushed face and pitied her. By the time the nurse returned with the Royal Physician to find the Princess being rocked by her stepmother, looking the very picture of health, the damage had been done.  


From that day forth, it was the Queen who made tonics to soothe the Princess’s colic, the Queen who wove charms to hang over the Princess’s cradle to protect her from night terrors, the Queen who listened to Cook’s complaints about how finicky the Princess’s palate was becoming and who thwarted his dreams of gastronomical adventure with a mere raised eyebrow.  


The Queen oversaw the Princess’s wardrobe with her own hands, dressing her in practical wools and linens rather than the silks her predecessor had so loved. There were some whispers in the Court, even then, that it was because the Queen envied the Princess’s youth, but by and large, it was laughed down. The Court had eyes, after all, to see the softening of the Queen’s expression when her stepdaughter paused her games to run into her arms; and to accuse any woman, particularly one as fiercely beautiful as the Queen, of envying a half-grown stripling was nothing short of ridiculous.

One thing, though, the Court did note, and bring out endlessly in the years to come: that the sole occasion on which the Queen had been angered by her stepdaughter was when the child had stumbled across the shining mirror that hung in the Queen’s most secret of chambers.  


The ladies-in-waiting who had been present said later that the Queen had gone white when she saw what had happened, then red, then white again; and before anyone could tell what had happened, she had crossed in the room in three steps and pulled the Princess away.  


“You must never look at my mirror again, do you hear? Do you?”  


The Princess looked up at her stepmother in what must have been shock, and perhaps it was this that led the Queen to shake her with such rage that the ladies-in-waiting began to whisper among themselves. Not a one, it should be mentioned, made any move to separate the Princess from the Queen.  


“Do you understand?” repeated the Queen as she shook the child again, and the Princess, mute with fright, could only nod her head desperately in reply.  


“Good,” snarled the Queen, and let her go.

* * *

There was no denying, however, that the problems truly began when the Princess reached womanhood. Until then life had gone on peacefully enough. The King ignored his daughter; and the Queen loved her; and the Princess grew up strikingly lovely, with hair black as coal and skin white as bone and eyes that shone like fire. She laughed in the middle of Court, and threw her arms around her father’s advisors trustingly and danced at balls with more delight than skill.  


The Queen remained as beautiful as ever, but she did not bear a child.  


The Court whispered about that as well, but were not entirely surprised. There was a coolness about her, they felt, one that meant that however gentle the Queen was with her stepdaughter, somehow they could not imagine her with a child of her own getting. Naturally it was a disappointment, to lack an heir to the throne, but if the King would raise no complaint, how could they?  


But the King’s patience could only last so long, and his long-forgotten frustration and rage came back to the light when he saw that on his daughter’s birthday, when he saw that seventeen years had gone by, and he was an old man; and his Queen had borne him no sons. It began as barbs, at first; and then progressed to shouts and threats; but none of these had any effect on the Queen’s serenity.  


The King, now utterly all at ends, turned his fury on his daughter. It was her fault, he convinced himself: she had reminded him of the fault in his marriage, and he could not forgive her that. And what was more, unlike her stepmother, she did him the favor of flinching at his insults and recoiling from his anger. He would have gone on in this way if it had not been for the morning that he raised his hand to strike the Princess for neglecting to train her dogs well enough to keep from pouncing on him when he entered the castle, only to find his hand caught in midair by his wife, who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.  


“No,” said the Queen levelly, and took the Princess away, and the King, helpless like everyone else in the face of the Queen’s dignity, said nothing but privately decided that it was tending to the Princess that had twisted her from her proper role. If, he resolved, his daughter was tucked out of the way, perhaps in a nunnery or sent to one of the draughty castles on the edge of the kingdom, his wife would recall that her first service was due to him.  


What the Queen thought of this, no one could guess, but all knew this: not seven mornings from then, the King was found dead in his sleep.

* * *

Six months after the demise of the King, the Huntsman knelt at his Queen’s feet.  


He was not a man who was particularly inclined to ask questions, which was largely why he had risen to being the leader of the King’s Hunt, and as far as he was concerned, the fewer questions people had about _him_ , the better.  


“My husband depended on you,” the Queen said by way of greeting, beginning to pace back and forth before her throne. “Those enemies of his too…delicate to condemn in public, he commended to you, and you brought him back his trophies.”  


“That is true,” he said, placidly enough; for if she wanted to remind him of things he knew perfectly well, he had no objection.  


"Did you ever question him?" 

That was easy enough to answer. The great and mighty he had hunted, those whose blood was pure and noble in its own right, and never had his hands faltered.  


"Never, Your Majesty. Not even when he asked me to deal with the Queen that was." 

She said with something that, in a lesser moment, he might have mistaken for despair: “Were you never once brought to pity?”  


An even easier question. “Never, Your Majesty.”  


The Queen regarded him with the cool consideration she did everyone else, then seemed to come to a decision. “Very well, my Huntsman. Go into the woods with my daughter Snow White and bring me back her heart.”  


He failed, of course. It was the first time he had ever done so, and it was not pity or kindness or even morals that stayed his hand from slaying the child. It was only the simple realization that Snow White had, of all things, eyebrows shaped with the exact arch of her father’s, and this thought reminded the Huntsman that his ancestors had served hers for generations upon generations, and from then on, it became a matter of professional ethics.  


When he let her go, he did so with the knowledge that there was no greater authority on bloodshed than him in the entire kingdom. If he said the child was dead, she was; if he said her heart was a deer’s, it was.  


It was that conviction he clung to when he knelt at the Queen’s feet a day later, clutching a little heart in a stained handkerchief to him. He told the Queen how he had taken the Princess to ride in the woods; and how he had startled her horse so it would toss her to the ground and gallop away; even the exact cut he had used to slit her throat. As final proof, he pushed the heart into the Queen’s hands, ignoring the expressions that crossed her face as he did so.  


The Queen rose.  


“This is the heart of Snow White?”  


“Yes, Your Majesty.”  


“This is the heart of the Princess, which you took from her corpse after you slew her, alone and unprotected?”  


“Yes, Your Majesty.”  


“Do you swear that this is true?” she asked, a final, third time, and—  


“Yes, Your Majesty,” he lied again.  


And then the Queen did something that confused him: she looked expectedly at the side, where a trapdoor had been built into the wall so cunningly one would not know it was there unless one had grown up in the palace, as the Huntsman had. To his horror, the door opened; and three people came through, and they were the first justices of the realm and among those doddering old men who the young Princess had so enchanted. He did not need to ask if they had heard every word; of course they had.  


“Behold,” said the Queen, gesturing at him. “Our Princess’s self-proclaimed murderer.”  


She stepped back then, for there was precious little else to do, and let the Court exact its judgment. What words the Huntsman thought of to say in his defense I do not know, but this much is certain—in death as in life, he did not betray his Queen.

* * *

It was surprising, the Queen thought to herself some time later as she dangled a poisoned comb from her fingers, how very rare it was for people to stop and think.  


Take the girl, for example. If there was one thing she had impressed on Snow White as a child, it was to never accept anything from strangers, to never trust any gift from any bearer that she couldn’t verify independently. There was nothing the Queen could have done about the girl’s fondness for laces and ribbons and frippery; her love for beautiful, useless things would be her undoing.  


The corset had failed. She had meant it to fail, she told herself; she had meant it to fail because it would not be enough. It was a coward’s measure, she knew, and so too was poison. To bring about what she intended, she would have to watch Snow White die, to see her shudder with pain before growing cold and still, to weep over her body as she had not wept in seventeen years. 

It was for this reason the fates scorned her, letting passersby loosen the stays. It was for this reason the Huntsman’s resolve had failed when she had needed it most.  


She knew there was no other way. She had studied magic long and hard in those first few months after the news of the first Queen’s death had come, doing everything and anything it took to transform herself from humble hedgewitch to formidable magician.  


To regain something dear, she would have to sacrifice that which she held most precious in return—and every time she consulted the heavy silver mirror, enchanted by the long-treasured potion of distilled love to reveal that which rested inside her heart, every time it showed her the same thing over and over again, no matter how many times she begged it to ask anything, _anything_ else: Snow White.  


Snow White, Snow White, Snow White.  


For Snow White the Queen had let her friend's killer live for a few years more, since the Princess had loved her father with all her child's heart and would have broken at his loss. For Snow White, she had murdered him later, when it had become clear that he was as incapable of showing love to his child as he had been to his wife; for Snow White, she had lingered in the Court for years upon years instead of wreaking her vengeance upon all who deserved it as she had intended from the start.  


But enough was enough, and Her Majesty had come first. It was in Her Majesty's name that she had used her prized potion to turn herself so fair as to become Queen. It was in Her Majesty’s name she had sent the Huntsman to the hangman; however innocent of Snow White's murder he might be, someone else had died by his hand. It was in Her Majesty’s name that she ruled the Court, that had stood by and done nothing, with an iron hand. It was to Her Majesty she sought to return the years of long life and just rule that had been taken from the first Queen by her husband’s rage, and the Huntsman’s cruelty, and the Court’s disregard. And for that matter, hadn't it been Snow White's very birth, when one thought about it, that had caused Her Majesty's death to begin with?  


The Queen set the comb aside and took up the vial of distilled power that had created the Princess in the first place. It burned as brilliantly scarlet as it had the day she had first bottled it in the cottage; and when she dipped a round ripe apple into the mixture, it shone with similar luster.  


Snow White had been born from love; and so love alone that could destroy her. 

A heavy cost to pay. It was worth it. It must be.

* * *

The Court knew the rest of the story.  


An apple, the bite from the Princess’s lips, the death-like sleep, the kiss that woke her at last. The well-deserved demise of the Evil Queen, the Wicked Stepmother, after she consulted her magic mirror once again, after having watched Snow White die from a poisoned apple, only to see her stepdaughter's reflection gazing back at her.  


_(Salt in her wound, it had been, to see the child's face in the mirror one more time. Hadn't she done it? Hadn't she cut out the part of her heart that she loved best, hadn't she done all that that laws of the universe had asked of her to have Her Majesty live once more? Why, then, why did her mirror and her magic taunt her with the reminder of all she had lost? And her rage was compounded when she worked the spell to exchange Her Majesty's life for her daughter's, and found, every time, that it was unsuccessful.  
_

_She realized then what a fool she had been.  
_

_Her Majesty must have crossed beyond this life already and had no interest in returning; even if the balance had worked, she would not walk in the lands of the living again. And the Queen had poisoned her own daughter to try and bring it about.  
_

_But. There were the potions balanced perfectly to bring back a life; and bright in her memory was the image of Snow White, sprawled on the dust of her cottage floor, a half-eaten apple beside her._

_The decision was easy enough after that. A life for a life. The thought of having her daughter live. The hope of seeing Her Majesty once more.  
_

_Leagues away, Snow White shuddered and woke.)  
_

The Court knew the rest of the story, as well as their own embellishments .The Princess living alone in a cottage, surviving in a village by her own strength and her own wits? Absurd. Surely she must have had protectors—dwarves, perhaps. Had she only married a baron’s third son, clever and gentle with a warm smile? No, a duke, a prince, even! Did she insist, at her wedding, that she could feel her stepmother’s presence near? Well, that was simply because the bridal couple had called the witch there, to dance to her death in red-hot shoes. Did Snow White, with her husband, rule the kingdom with the wisdom and kindness her mother had so longed for? Nonsense; it was only that they lived happily ever after.  


This one thing, though, even they could not make sense of: that the Princess raised a grand monument to the mother who had born her, and one beside it and equally grand, and to the end of her days, would never explain for whom the second was meant.  


But then again, they consoled themselves, reigning Queens were always allowed to be a little foolish.


End file.
